Conventional nuclear fusion machines (tokamaks, mirrors, tandem mirrors, . . . ) are designed to fuse only deuterium-tritium (D-T or d-t). This fuel gives off 80% of its energy in the form of fast neutrons. These, in turn, irradiate the apparatus and transmute it to radioactive isotopes. This makes the apparatus "too hot to handle" and results in lengthy shutdowns, the use of remote control industrial manipulators, etc. Furthermore, neutrons from d-t fuel can be used to transmute common U-238 into nuclear fission bomb material. This would be much easier than separating U-235 from U-238 by gas diffusion apparatus.
Still more, d-t neutrons must be shielded from the supercooled coils of the machines. This takes room--about 1.5 meters of shielding thickness. This factor plus the inherent low power density of these devices, would make these power plants large, complicated, expensive and of questionable acceptance by the utility companies.
Accordingly, a way is needed to fuse cleaner proton (vs. neutron) based fuel. The cleanest, least neutron-emissive, of all known fuels is boron hydride or protons-boron-11. It has no free neutrons on either side of its equation p+.sup.11 B=3.alpha.+W, where the three alphas, .alpha., are helium nuclei and W is the energy release per fusion reaction. Helium is benign and may be released in the atmosphere or used industrially. Boron hydride (B-H) is abundant, inexpensive, available, radiation-free. It cannot be "burned" (fused) by tokamaks or conventional mirrors or tandem mirrors because they cannot produce a sufficiently hot plasma (6.times.10.sup.11 .degree.C.). These devices are deficient in energy by about a factor of 17 just to burn d-t, the easiest of fuels. Their plasma energy must be increased by a factor of about 1700 to burn B-H. No way is seen to do this, using conventional RF, ohmic and neutral beam injection heating techniques. Further, none of the inventor's previous inventions, including that of U.S. Pat. No. 4,189,346, were able to recirculate plasma particles which had lost more than fifty percent of their energy. This was because the weakened particles could no longer sufficiently cut the magnetic field in their recyclotron (or ring cyclotron, as some were called) to get back to their electrode gap for reacceleration. Also, ions were initially injected from one side instead of in the main plane of spiral acceleration. This tended to make the particles spiral into the electrode sidewalls. Both of these defects have been remedied in the Recyclotron III. The improvements are far more than obvious. The electromagnets had to be heavily redesigned to provide input and output beam magnetic wells. These magnetic wells vastly improve the feasilibity of arranging recyclotrons in series. These are the most significant changes over previous inventions or applications. (Jarnagin's U.S. Pat. No. 4,202,725 is entirely different.) Accordingly, consider a new approach.